She kept getting looks from people at Carramba, and it wasn't just because she was bonded to a dragon. Well, that's why they usually started looking, but then they would keep staring. Particularly other Kthari, who she realized were likely not from the same 'version' of their homeworld as she was. She actually got pretty good at explaining this, though it often went over their heads unless they had something like that power themselves.
"But you've got those big wings, where are the hooks? How can you grab your enemies," one Kthari male whose own wings were leathery and somewhat short commented, "if you don't have hooks?"
"Your skin is so dark compared to your wing type that's very unusual," another female stated, but she seemed more curious and intrigued than put off. She became one of Delta's best friends over the next few weeks!
"That's a muzzle, wow your tail is really long and fluffy!" A third Kthari had said in passing her in the halls.
All those things were definitelyt true: her wings were very large and feathered, her furless skin, what little was visible anyway, was a rich brown shade that blended into a velvet on her upper arms, back, and tail. Her face did have a muzzle, and really she did have little conical ears like a feline's that her fluffy hair covered up. And all those things were apparently features found in very distinct tribes among those other Kthari. Some were very tall with leathery wings, others with the feathers usually came with pale furless skin, some had more avian or more feline features and acted accordingly. She was like a cross between them all, and she had to explain: that was how all Kthari on her version of their homeworld looked.
Further, she needed to make sure before talking about it - their species on that moon were not engineered. They were naturally occurring on her dimension. But in these many other cases, they had been created by some prior civilization out of the humanoids, avians, and felines that existed elsewhere, and brought to Mahar 2, 3, and 4 - moons that the big gas giant supported. Possibly they had been on Mahar 1, but... at least in her dimension, the tribe's lore and mythology always painted that moon as dead and the resting place of angry spirits.
Some day, she might go there, just to see what was really going on there.
Some day, as long as she knew it was safe for Tadjath, that is! Her sleek blue dragon matched her feather colors nicely, they made a great visual team. They made an incredibly good flight pair, too! Tadjath's wings grew strong and sure as they took classes in the cold icy winds of Dragonhope Weyr, his birthplace. A couple other candidates remained on to give their own dragons more training, maybe they needed to return to worlds which had combat and aerial needs. But her own?
Well, her 'own' world wasn't where she was headed.
Delta had been on her own for eight years now, moving from world to world at first haphazardly, then as she realized how it was done, with conscious effort. She can 'see' glimpses of these distant realities if she concentrates, though they're always fleeting until she goes somewhere. Then, her memory clings to that particular wavelength, and she can reliably return to worlds she's visited.
What had brought her to Pern though? Well, maybe the high winds, maybe the rugged terrain. Maybe the dragons? She remembered seeing a glimmer of large wings, of many colors, and a great nasty red blot behind them. Turned out, that was known as the Red Star, not a star at all - and it brought awful crud that leeched across space somehow, dragging biological nightmares in the form of 'Thread'. Thankfully she didn't have to go up and fight that, she along with several others of this year's hatchings would be leaving Dragonhope once their dragon could teleport properly.
It was something else that she and Tadjath had in common, to a degree. He could move them on-site, she could move them both somewhere interesting! Tadjath seems to like it at Carramba, and so does Delta.
Her visions of other worlds and dimensions are very strong here, for some reason. Of course that reason is that it's a Nexus spot, where many of those realities actually collide directly. And that is something she's learning about from that spooky suited man that showed up to collect other people after their own hatchings at Dragonhope. They moved between worlds so smoothly that she was really surprised. But then - so was he! To have a suddenly-appearing Kthari like this, Lane claimed it was not the first time but certainly quite rare. One of his own students just a couple years before, had been such a dimension hopper, a female named Eastamin, who had graduated last year. Lane expressed that he was glad Delta had arrived at a time in her life that she could still enjoy schooling, because, he said, she could learn so much and retain it all very well.
He helped her with the paperwork involved in getting her own place and classes at Carramba, but he left her to her own devices to figure out who to befriend, where to hang out, or what to avoid in the city at large. Since she also was still taking care of a 'teenage' dragon, there were facilities available for Tadjath, and he fit in at least visually with twin blues from another set of parents at Dragonhope. They looked great all flying in formation! ... Well until they crashed into one another, but that would happen to the best of them...
It was possible that Tadjath and Delta might actually work directly with the Carramba Dragon Studies program, once she graduated. One of their elder instructors, a human named Hollis, claimed that she would be suited to bringing newly Searched candidates to their right destinations, and that was something she really looked forward to doing!